VRMove: A Comparative Evaluation of Walking Methods for Reducing Simulator Sickness for a High-Fidelity Archery Virtual Reality Simulation

A major factor preventing the wider adoption of virtual reality is simulator sickness. Simulator sickness is an effect in which users experience motion-sickness-like symptoms such as headaches, nausea and dizziness. Simulator sickness most commonly occurs when moving in a virtual environment, known as locomotion.

Objectives

• Design a novel locomotion method, known as the Cradle Method, that makes use of haptic feedback such that it will reduce simulator sickness of a user, and increase the performance of a user in a virtual environment.

• Design a virtual forest environment, known as the Robin Hood Environment, in which a user can move around and shoot randomly appearing targets.

The cradle is a large ring attached to walls via tether cables. The cradle surrounds a user at stomach height. To enable locomotion a user must walk into the ring. The ring provides haptic feedback through the force of the ring against a user’s stomach.

Through human trials, we found that there was no significant decrease in simulator sickness in users while using the Cradle, and a decrease in performance.

These results may be inaccurate due to the small sample size tested during trials. There is opportunity to run trials again with a larger sample group.